


now I'm longing for the way I was

by glitteratiglue



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Canonical Character Death, Erik's existential angst, Identity Issues, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-21
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2019-05-26 10:57:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14999426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitteratiglue/pseuds/glitteratiglue
Summary: Yet again, he has let Charles crack him open like eggshell, and each time, he is changed by it. Not for the better, he thinks.[Five times Erik thought of himself as Magneto, and another time he couldn't.]





	now I'm longing for the way I was

**Author's Note:**

> Strictly more like shippy gen. I was aiming to write something silly and cracky about Magneto, but it got sad instead.
> 
> Thanks to evieeden for looking this over.

  **1.**

Magneto has inherited a headstrong team. Wrangling them is not all that dissimilar from herding cats or managing unruly teenagers. He exempts Mystique from this classification; she is still learning what it is to be one of them.

The first time he watches her torture a human being—a scientist devising methods for mutant experimentation; a necessary evil—he is thinking of someone else, and how disappointed he would be to see this.

 _No, hopelessly naïve_ , Magneto corrects, making sure to sneer the words even inside his own head. He forces the unwanted thought down and it stays put. He’s getting much better at doing that these days. The place between rage and serenity truly is where focus lies.

Still, when Mystique doesn’t show up for dinner that night, it bothers him. Dinners are an opportunity for team-bonding, for Magneto to demonstrate his leadership qualities and make any important announcements outside of their war councils. Plus, Angel has made tamales and they are Mystique’s favourite.

Magneto puts his fork down, his appetite rapidly fading. Azazel stares at him curiously, as though plotting something, but that is hardly unusual. It would not do to become paranoid. Magneto broods silently, only vaguely aware of the inquisitive looks Emma is sending his way. He can almost feel her telepathy bouncing off his helmet, her frustration at not being able to unpick his thoughts.

Later, in his office, Magneto rings the bell on his desk and makes sure to arrange his face into a bored and haughty expression. You can’t show these people weakness.

He waits, one hand absent-mindedly fiddling with the hem of his new cape. Its craftsmanship is exquisite: neat, small stitches and perfectly pressed seams. What a welcome surprise it had been to discover Riptide was so good at sewing. All it had taken was a quick trip to an atelier to steal some premium fabrics, plus the theft of a sewing machine, and Riptide had got to work. The whole Brotherhood would have thoroughly spiffy outfits by the time he was finished.

Emma glides into the room, resplendent in a white ermine cloak. She stands; there is no chair for her. Nobody sits in here except him, another display of power he considers prudent.

“Emma.”

“Yes, Magneto?” Her lip curls in obvious mockery. “You called?”

Magneto often finds himself wondering what game Emma is playing here, if any. What game she was playing with Shaw. He labors under no delusion that she wouldn’t leave him and the Brotherhood in the dust if the right opportunity presented itself. That is a cold comfort in its own way, as he knows she will never damn him with faint praise or flattery.

“I’m concerned about Mystique,” he says. The man today had died in the end, but that hadn't been Mystique's fault. Emma had finished him off.

“Ah,” Emma says with a knife-sharp smile. “Your little pet.”

Magneto lets his eyes glint dangerously and metal strips pull themselves from the floor, approaching her ankles. Emma stares him down coolly and a moment later, Magneto lets them fall with a wave of his hand. She will tell the others, and a good thing too, but like medicine, fear must be doled out at appropriate times.

“This about what happened today? She’s locked in her room snivelling. Thinking about your telepath friend.”

“That man is not my friend.” The safe place inside Magneto rattles; a persistent thought is threatening to spill out. He squashes it.

Distantly, Magneto knows that a part of him should care. Perhaps Erik would have, the man who kissed Raven Darkholme and told her to never cover up her stripes. If he were someone else, a different kind of leader, he would go to her and offer mindless platitudes. Maybe he’d even give her the things he knows she has never stopped wanting from him, from the way her eyes track him and her breath hitches when he stands close to her. He might, if not for the unspoken name that will always be between them.

And the effect such a tryst would likely have on Brotherhood morale. Magneto is no mind-reader, but he is hardly blind to the admiring glances and lewd thoughts written on the faces of his followers if he wears a tight shirt or takes to working out in the communal areas.

The point is, Magneto does not trifle himself with these matters. Magneto has underlings to carry out his wishes.

“Perhaps you could pay Mystique a visit and make sure her mind remains on mission,” he tells Emma. Realizing that sounds too much like a threat, he softens his voice and adds, “Tell her it gets easier after the first one.”

“Does it?” Emma says, frowning. Her eyes fix on his and they take the measure of one another, two killers with nefarious pasts who know a lie when they hear one.

“Tell her,” Magneto insists, bringing a commanding focus into his tone.

Emma nods and exits the room, her platform boots clacking all the way down the hall.

Magneto exhales slowly. He has a headache now.

He tries to press a hand over his eyes, but the helmet gets in the way; stupid thing. It has taken some getting used to. Sleeping in it gave him a crick in his neck for the first week until he hit on the idea of using a bolster beneath the standard pillow for extra support. He only removes it to shower, rationalizing that five minutes here and there are unlikely to leave him open to attack. Emma has offered to shield his mind while he does so, but Magneto prefers to keep her opportunities for mind-poking to a minimum.

Emma is useful, certainly, but telepaths are not to be trusted. Magneto has learned that the hard way.

 

**2.**

They have dispatched several key figures in Project WideAwake, but it has proven to be a hydra, another festering head sprouting wherever they remove one. Magneto worries for his disciples. He would like to insist that for the time being, they do not undertake missions away from the safety of their telepathically-shielded base, but that would be tantamount to showing fear.

The Brotherhood fears nothing. The same cannot be said for their leader. He has grown altogether too fond of them all — not that he allows himself to show it but in Mystique’s presence. She is his oldest friend here, she knew him before, and even though Magneto is now someone else, it would be a disservice to their history to not think of her in a somewhat friendly manner.

Magneto is packing for Dallas when Mystique saunters in, flopping down on the end of his spartan cot. He has started allowing a certain level of informality when it comes to his associates, reasoning that it never hurts to appear approachable.

She’s breathing heavily from exertion of some kind.

“What have you been up to?” he asks, his lips quirking into a smile.

Mystique grins. “Sparring with Azazel.” She rubs at her elbow. “I’m getting better.”

He nods approvingly. How she has grown in these past months: from a frightened girl unsure in her own skin to Mystique, a young woman confident in her powers and their mission. She had suppressed her potential for years, and there is only one person Magneto blames for that. That is as far as he will allow his thoughts to go on the matter.

She takes in the suitcase, the helmet resting next to it.

“You’re leaving already, Erik?” Concern is etched on her lovely blue features. He gives her his patented death-ray stare, and she hastily adds, rolling her eyes, “ _Magneto_. Whatever.”

“Look after the others until I get back,” Magneto says, folding a shirt and adding it to the neat pile in his case. “And please make sure Azazel doesn’t borrow any of Riptide’s designer suits again. I don’t want to have to repair tornado damage to the base for the third time.”

Mystique smothers a laugh. “I will. Though I’m not sure Emma needs looking after.” She pauses delicately. “What are you trying to achieve with this? What if our intelligence is wrong? We’re messing with powerful people who could come after us. And if not, who knows if he’ll even admit to you that he’s a mutant? He’s the president, for God’s sake.”

“I have to speak with him,” Magneto says earnestly. “If he’s one of us, I can convince him of the worthiness of our cause. This could herald the dawn of a new age of mutants.” He feels like he might burst with pride and righteousness. “A world where humans must answer to _us._ So, you see, I have to save him. We protect our own kind, Mystique.”

“Do we, Magneto?” Her yellow eyes are piercing, and he knows what she is insinuating. Who she is thinking of right now.

“We protect those who have the good sense to share our aims,” he amends.

Mystique sighs. He hopes she isn’t losing heart for their cause. She begins to rummage in his bedside drawer, and Magneto moves to stop her, thinking this is an impertinence he cannot possibly permit when she pulls out the small metal cigarette case he keeps hidden underneath everything else. He wonders how she knew about it; probably Azazel has been snooping again, curse him.

Inside rests a locket, a coin and a mangled bullet. She touches the bullet, a small sound escaping her, and Magneto has one of those unpleasant moments where his stomach squeezes and he has to shove a thought down into the metaphorical box inside him.

“Oh, Erik,” she says, voice thick with emotion, and he doesn’t have the strength to correct her this time.

She thumbs the catch on the locket and holds it up, revealing the faces of his parents. Magneto keeps his face blank and controlled.

“I know the government hates us. They’re afraid. But your parents were human too,” she says. “Just remember that.”

“I will try,” Magneto says. It is the best he can do.

Mystique presses the locket into his hand. He places his other hand on hers, resting it there for a few moments. She squeezes his fingers affectionately and leaves the room.

Magneto never imagines those worlds will be the last they will utter to each other for ten years.

 

**3.**

Magneto hustles through the streets of downtown Washington D.C. under the cloak of darkness.

His plans are in place, but he is running out of time. No doubt Charles, saintly to the last, will gladly give up the use of his legs in order to stop him. Hank’s ridiculously fast jet means they have a head start on him; they are probably back at the mansion already and Charles’s serum will be wearing off. Magneto needs his helmet back, and he needs it fast.

After his confrontation with Mystique in Paris, Magneto is...discomfited, to say the least. He should have seen it coming. She was never fully enmeshed in their cause, some part of her always longing to be Raven once more. The apple never falls far from the tree—even the self-righteous trees of Westchester—and she has grown her own branches in the time he was away. He no longer knows her. It is not a pleasant feeling.

Impulsively, he flies a fire hydrant through a department store window and summons a fetching fedora and an expensive pair of designer sunglasses. Though time is pressing, it is a joy for Magneto to wear these fine things after a decade of hideous jumpsuits and rubber shoes. He has a new spring in his step already.

As he walks, a thought rises in his mind, unbidden. He remembers the blind, stupid hope in Charles’s voice, in his words to Mystique: _“We’ve come for you, Erik and I. Together.”_  Magneto feels his throat closing up. He coughs like a cat trying to rid itself of a furball until he decides the response is merely emotional. Like all unnecessary things, it can be forced away.

He does this, then steals a car and makes for the other side of the Potomac.

But try as he might, thoughts continue to drift in. Charles Xavier is the enemy, he reminds himself; forever seeking to distract him from doing whatever is necessary to achieve justice for mutants. Magneto finds it preferable to ignore the aspects that don’t fit with this Machiavellian version of Charles: their chess game on the plane and the good-natured teasing that accompanied it; the hurt in Charles’s saucer-like eyes when he accused him of abandoning him, that looked just the same as it had on a beach in Cuba.

Charles had once looked at him—Erik, not Magneto—another way with those eyes; hooded and flirtatious over chessboards and the breakfast table and countless hotel rooms. They had been tipping towards something so fledgling they couldn’t name it yet, but it was as real as the sky and the ground all around them. In the end it came to nothing, nothing but unsaid words and touches never realized, except in the lucid dreams that haunted them both in separate bedrooms at night. So much want dripped from Charles’s mind while he slept that Erik felt it too, saturating every surface, rippling through his body like a wave until he woke, hard and sweating and frozen to his bed with fear, unable to go to Charles, unable to ask for or take the things he wanted from him.

The past is immaterial now. Magneto tries again to erase Charles from his mind, and this time succeeds. He rolls the vehicle to a stop and cuts the engine.

He buries the lingering guilt deep inside him and forms a nearby pipe into two metal spheres, letting them hover in the air above his fingers.

The sun is nudging its way from beneath the horizon, a hazy orange glow already visible behind the Pentagon. A beautiful morning, really. Magneto stops a few feet away from the entrance barriers and grins to himself.

Time to go to work.

 

**4.**

The small churchyard is quiet, the dark skies above threatening rain. Magneto knows the risk he takes in coming here — though the world knows of the part he played in averting disaster, his fate remains undecided. Fortunately, the weather is on his side this morning and there isn’t a soul, unless you count the dead ones under his feet.

He missed the funeral; he could never have gone, of course. Instead, he went to the memorial service for Havok. He stood at Charles’s side and tried not to think of the young Alex Summers he once knew. That Alex had been hampered by the anger that was too big for his skin, scared of his powers and himself. More than once Magneto deeply regretted that he had not enticed him over to their side. He could have taught him so much.

Magneto tries to focus. He reaches out with his power, and finds what he is looking for with a shock that pulls at his gut. A necklace, bought at a market for Magda after the first night they spent together. It was a plain, flimsy pendant — he could have stolen something far more expensive from a jeweller’s, but this was the one she wanted. Cheap nickel alloy; magnetic. He’d always used it to sense her presence, and he senses it now with a quiet horror, several feet beneath the earth.

His feet carry him down the rows of graves and then he is there, looking at two mounds of earth with twin wooden crosses, awaiting their future headstones.

He kneels, asking forgiveness from the two people who cannot answer him. The last of summer’s heat has faded from the earth and his knees quickly grow cold, the damp of the soil leaching through fabric and into his bones. He hardly notices.

A part of him lies dead there, too: Henryk, or rather, Erik. Magneto spins a banal eulogy in his head to pass the time. There lies Erik, who used to drive a battered old Lada and host his friends over beers in his farmhouse; Erik, who laughed and clapped when his daughter took her first steps on their threadbare carpet; Erik, whose chickens would bite him when he sprinkled their feed in the backyard. Erik, who loved Magda; who loved Nina.

Magneto closes his eyes. His face is wet.

Apocalypse is gone, but his augmentations remain. There is no reaching anymore, for Magneto: his power simply comes. He is a vessel with a waterfall pouring into it, overflowing and limitless. He feels it awaken inside him, surging from deep within to his fingertips, and his eyes snap open. He presses a hand to the ground and senses the magnetic elements there, watches the tremor as the soil shifts and vibrates beneath his hand. It would be no effort at all to raze the entire graveyard; he could do it with a thought, with one flick of his finger. Such power frightens even him. He blinks, fighting to regain control of himself.

His skin prickles. Someone is here. He turns to find a dark, striking woman watching him. She steps forward and with a shimmer, transforms into a guileless, baby-faced blonde. Here is Mystique — no, Raven. She no longer answers to her true name.

Magneto stumbles to his feet.

“Hello, Raven.” He’s sure he looks like hell; he doesn’t bother to wipe the tears that are still dripping from his face. “How did you get here?”

“Kurt.” She indicates the blue teleporter he remembers from Egypt, peering around a tree in the distance. Kurt waves at them enthusiastically, his forked tail bouncing as he does so. “Sometimes he makes me miss Azazel.”

It is on the tip of Magneto’s caustic tongue to say he has never missed Azazel, irritating as he was, but that would hardly be true. He mourned each of his lost compatriots in his own way. He has mourned his parents for his entire life. Really, he is used to this. Only, this time he is faced with the loss of a life he built for himself: human and messy and so real he can still taste it in his mind, feel it burned into the marrow of him.

He sniffs and turns back to Raven. “Charles will know you’ve come here,” he says warily.

“I don’t care,” she says, her expression defiant. There is the old Mystique. For her, he dredges up the shadow of a smile.

“I’m not very good company right now,” Magneto says. “Why are you here?”

At the mansion, while the rebuilding work was completed, Raven had avoided him entirely, not so much as turning a glance his way. He hadn't blamed her for it, but her appearance here was the last thing he expected.

“He wouldn’t want you to be alone right now, Erik,” she says, coming forward with arms outstretched as though to hug him.

 _“Don’t.”_ Magneto curls his hands into fists and backs away. The earth trembles beneath their feet, and Raven goes stock still, fear in her eyes. She knows what he is capable of.

He can’t think of Charles; he can’t. He can’t think of the sanctuary he offered him — a place on the teaching staff. A purpose. A home. For a brief time there, Magneto fell into routines he remembered: breakfasts in the sun-warmed kitchen amid a throng of teenagers, playing chess in the evenings with Charles. He could have had that life, and he wanted it with a fierceness that lay thick on his tongue, heavy on his chest. And still he said no, and he went.

He even left the helmet with Charles in a foolish show of good faith. This has always been Magneto’s undoing, his weakness: his reliance on others, his susceptibility to their insidious, well-intentioned emotions that worm their way under his skin. Yet again, he has let Charles crack him open like eggshell, and each time, he is changed by it. Not for the better, he thinks.

By now, Magneto has stopped shaking the earth with his powers, but Raven keeps her hands raised, maintaining a safe distance from him. Kurt steps out from behind the tree, as if to do something; for now, he remains still.

“Charles misses you,” she presses on. “He pretends otherwise, but I know him better than anyone. It’s breaking him, the fact you won’t come home. Come home. We need you.”

Magneto wipes away the last of the tears with the back of his hand and schools his countenance into old, familiar hard lines.

“It was never my home,” he returns coldly.

Raven laughs, clear and sharp, her hands coming back down to rest at her sides. “That’s my line.”

He tries not to smile, and fails.

“What will you do now, Erik?” she asks.

There hardly seems to be any point in correcting her on the name. Magneto finds himself longing for the early days of the Brotherhood, when everyone around him would at least address him properly.

He has no answer — at least, none that would satisfy her or Charles.

“Goodbye, Raven,” he says, trying to convey finality in his voice. He turns away from her and angles his face to the sky, to the rain that is just starting to fall. Half a minute later, a crack sounds, and he finds he is alone once more.

Magneto lets his power pull the tokens from his pocket into his hand: a bullet, a gold wedding band, a locket. Each with its own unique weight and metallic signature, each with its own terrible significance. He leaves them there at the graveside, a peace offering of sorts.

The coin, he keeps. It is the last part of his old self he cannot let go of.

 

**5.**

He is surprised to find the Brotherhood’s lair still standing. They had camouflaged it well, and the location is suitably remote, but it looks as though nobody has been here in a very long time.

Magneto brushes away the cobwebs and taps in the code that still works on the outer door. Three feet of reinforced steel whirs and slides open with a series of grinding sounds he quiets with a twitch of his fingers.

The grime of more than twenty years coats everything, but it all remains unchanged, eerily so. Briefly, he wonders why Raven never came here in all the years he has been away. Then he doesn’t. She would have never wanted to be reminded of this place, not after all they have lost.

In their common room, Magneto beholds the strange tableau, frozen in time. Here is one of Emma’s fur stoles, draped over a chair, so thick with dust it sends him into a coughing fit when he picks it up. Here are a pair of Angel’s shiny thigh-high boots, crumpled against one wall. A packet of the Parliaments Azazel used to smoke, half of them gone. He sees him now, lounging in a leather chair, gesticulating with a lit cigarette and making sarcastic comments in his distinctive Russian-accented English.

Janos’s fate remains a mystery — there was no mention of him in Trask’s files, nor has any other gossip been forthcoming. Magneto likes to think he is still out there somewhere, perhaps putting his talents as a tailor to good use.

They had never kept much food around, owing to their frequent need to be away, so the kitchen is thankfully not overrun by rats. Magneto considers; he could probably live here for a while if he brought in some provisions.

He cannot bring himself to enter any of their living quarters, suspecting that the personal effects in there would prove too much for him.

Magneto decides instead to take a look at his old office. The door is rusted shut; it takes his powers to persuade the lock to loosen and give way. The sleek, black metal desk looks the same as it ever did. On it sits old, crinkled papers and blueprints, a Filofax and a series of hand-crafted fountain pens his powers allowed him to easily procure. He eyes the hard and uncomfortable chair he would perch on and make pronouncements to his underlings. No, his equals; he’d just never called them that in their presence.

He stands there and wonders if he has the strength to start again, to form a new Brotherhood from the ashes of the old. Finding new mutants will be a challenge without Cerebro, but he has always had connections to the underworld. He can start there. With Caliban, if he must, although he has never managed to deal with the supercilious albino without wanting to send something metal and pointy through his head.

He slips the Filofax into his pocket. Some of his contacts are bound to still be alive. After what happened in Washington D.C. all those years ago, many of the undiscovered mutants out there chose to be more cautious. They no longer organised, they hid themselves away, cowed by fear; something Magneto regretted more than he could say. It had been the same ever since, and the solutions successive governments had proposed to the mutant ‘problem’ grew more and more terrifying.

Magneto sighs. He waits for the old anger to come, recalling a time when he could tap into that wellspring of power triggered by rage (and fine, maybe the occasional smidgen of serenity). Now he hardly needs to try: he doesn’t need the anger, much less anything else before endless power is brimming at his fingertips.

His brief enthusiasm for a new phase of recruitment is slipping away. He sags into the chair, the exhaustion of the last few weeks finally setting in.

The world has changed, and perhaps his heart simply isn’t in it anymore. Maybe there are better ways to fight for mutants. His thought turn to Charles: no longer so trusting as he once was, so quick to believe in the benevolence of humanity. Charles is making compromises, concessions. It could be time for Magneto to make some of his own.

He will have to be sure about this. He resolves to think upon it, but the fog of tiredness is setting in. Sleep, then.

He wanders his way towards his old room on heavy legs. It smells musty, but otherwise looks as stark and blankly comforting as it always did. He crawls into bed, still dressed, and sleeps the watchful sleep of a man who has never taken safety for granted.

 

**(+1.)**

Several months later, Magneto finds himself at 1407 Greymalkin Lane.

The mansion looms impressively out of the dark as he approaches. No lights are on; the students must be in bed at this hour. As he nears the entrance, a light flicks on in an upstairs window he knows at once. Charles has of course sensed his coming, as he knew he would. This signal is unnecessary: Magneto knows his route to Charles’s bedroom like the back of his hand, could walk it in his sleep, even though he has never been in there save for in his dreams. His powers open the front door easily, and he walks the familiar route as if in a daze.

He reaches the bedroom—its door open, light spilling out into the hallway—and there is Charles, in his wheelchair, dressed in striped cotton pyjamas and clearly ready for bed. Charles would not look out of place with an old-fashioned nightcap perched on his bald head. A thoroughly disarming sight, Magneto thinks, one that belies Charles’s extraordinary power, the fact that he could kill everyone within a mile radius with his mind if he chose to do so. There are dark circles under his eyes, but he looks well enough otherwise.

“Hello, old friend,” Charles says warmly. His face is open and smiling, hiding any private expectations he may have. “This is quite a surprise.” He gestures to a chair in front of him. “Sit, please.”

“Thank you,” Magneto says, moving to sit opposite Charles, the coffee table between them. He shrugs his jacket off, laying it over the chair back.

“How are you?” Charles asks blandly, as if there is nothing unusual about this situation.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t kept up with me, Charles.”

“Enough to know you haven’t reassembled your Brotherhood,” Charles says, his features inscrutable. Magneto suddenly longs to be a telepath, to know what is going on behind that maddeningly calm mask.

“I’ve been thinking,” Magneto begins awkwardly. “Maybe there are other ways I hadn’t considered to fight for mutant rights. The world is different now. I can’t see the path I was going down ending in anything but bloodshed and destruction for all of us. Mutants included. It might be time to try something different.”

Charles’s eyes widen. “I confess I didn’t expect you to come out with it right away. What are you saying?”

“I’m saying,” Magneto says deliberately, “that should your offer still be open to me, I would like to take you up on it. To teach here. To guide the mutants of the future, and prepare them in case the war does come.”

Magneto has wrestled with himself these past months, considering what he is willing to give up. Finally deciding to come here was the last step, but he couldn’t be sure it was the right decision until he saw Charles again.

He watches Charles evaluate him with a considering gaze and an old fear rears its head. Charles is the enemy, capable of multitudes; he could be inside his head right now, influencing him. He is a distraction, a weakness. Magneto knows this. Unfortunately, Erik doesn’t. Nor does he realize how loud his thoughts are until he watches Charles’s expression twist.

“You think I’m making you do this?” Charles gets out, his face crumpling.

“No,” Magneto admits, feeling something shift inside him, a part of himself giving in to whatever this is. “But I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I mean it this time, Charles. Every word.”

In that moment, he becomes Erik again, the man who once loved Charles. The man who has never stopped loving him.

“We’ll have to talk more, Erik,” Charles warns. “Of course the offer is still open, but this seems sudden. I need to know you won’t leave again.” His voice quavers, the mask cracking for an instant. “I couldn’t bear it.”

What Erik does next is unclear when it comes back to him; an image seen through a kaleidoscope. He tries to find the right words, but they are thick in his mouth, crowding his throat and he cannot get them out. He uses his powers to shove the table away, and then he is sinking to the floor, kneeling at Charles’s feet like a supplicant.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs desperately into the fabric of Charles’s pants, forehead pressed against Charles’s knees, a place he can’t feel. “I’m sorry, and I haven’t said it anywhere near as much as I should have over the years.”

Charles makes a noise of frustration. His hands come down to Erik’s head to gently push him away.

“Get up, Erik,” he says, unsmiling. “I _know_ you’re sorry _._ But do you think so little of me that you think I need you to prostate yourself at my feet? Do you really think I’m still angry, after all this time?”

“You should be,” Erik chokes out. His face is hot. He rises to his feet and reaches out for his jacket, preparing to leave. He has humiliated himself more than enough for one night.

He doesn’t notice Charles has rolled closer until his fingers close around his forearm, not gently.

“I gave up my anger because it was destroying me,” Charles says, quiet and honest. “I chose instead to focus my energies on my students, and hoped to one day convince you of a better path.” Erik manages to finally look at Charles, and finds him smiling. “Evidently, that idea has had varying success rates over the years.”

“True enough,” Erik says, still resigned to walking away. He shakes off Charles's hand and picks up his jacket.

“I didn’t say you should go,” Charles says, and now his voice is low and commanding in a way that sends a shiver down Erik’s spine. He tugs at Erik, and Erik drops the jacket and goes willingly, settling himself back into the chair. Charles is so close to him now that their knees are touching.

Charles’s eyes fix on his, and Erik sees his own want reflected there as if it’s 1962 all over again. He is cut open, made vulnerable beyond belief just from that look.

“I don’t think we should talk anymore,” Charles says, the words coming out unsteady, and Erik can’t help but agree.

The need and longing of years is coalescing in Erik's belly, driving him to action. His hands press down on Charles’s shoulders, pulling him closer, and then it is happening, the kiss he has seen so many times and in so many ways, none of them real until now.

For a long time, Erik was unsure of what he wanted, but now he knows it is this: Charles’s mouth wet on his mouth, his hands grasping at Erik’s shirt, the sounds Charles makes in the back of his throat as he kisses him, fiercely and with his whole heart. It is the unfolding of something they have both waited a lifetime for, the end of a war Erik used to think he would never stop fighting.

When their mouths eventually come apart, he feels Charles nudging at his mind tentatively, unsure if he’ll let him in the way he never did before. This time, breaking the habit of decades, Erik lets his control fall and opens himself for Charles. Charles’s hands are warm on his cheeks, his eyes wide and damp as Erik’s thoughts and dreams and secrets spill into his mind; vengeful words, sweet nothings, memories and pain overwhelming him with their power, their truth.

“It feels like you’re inside me,” Erik says in wonder, unthinking, and Charles laughs a little while acknowledging what he really meant.

 _Come here_ , he hears in his mind, and then Charles’s hand is around the back of his neck, drawing them together, and there is no more talking.

They kiss and touch reverently, lost in the newness and fragility of the moment, and then Charles takes Erik to his bed. There is some awkwardness at first as they figure each other out, as Erik makes sense of how this can be different and yet the same with Charles’s injury, but somehow, it is better than he has ever imagined. It is real and raw and true, better for the fact they are not their younger selves, choked by fear and inaction and haunted by things that had not yet come to pass.

“I can’t wait to tell Raven,” Charles says later, his breaths still coming quick and shallow. Erik is slumped against his side, his cheek mashed into Charles’s collarbone, but now he lifts his head.

“I don’t know how pleased she’ll be to see me, considering the way we left things.”

“Oh, I think you are greatly underestimating her capacity for forgiveness. Things have changed a great deal around here. Her and Hank, they’re together now.”

Erik lets out a sound of disbelief and then smiles. “I’ll be damned,” he says. “There’s hope for us all.”

“Especially for you, my friend,” Charles says fondly, reaching out to pat Erik’s cheek.

Erik fights the urge to roll his eyes in the face of Charles’s relentless optimism, but he is affected by it to the point where he has to shuffle forward and kiss him again.

“You’re home, Erik,” Charles says in amazement, like he hardly believes it.

“Yes,” Erik says, sleepy and sated, feeling like himself at last. “I’m not going anywhere.”


End file.
